Nick Williams, Inspired Entrepreneur, on working alone at home
Nick Williams is a bestselling author
and founder of inspired-entrepreneur.com.
He has helped thousands of people all over the world
to find work that fulfils them.
I asked his advice on how home workers can deal with three key issues:
spending a lot of time alone,
dealing with resistance
and handling setbacks and rejection when what we do is often intensely personal.
Here is Nick’s response to the challenge of spending a lot of time alone:
‘There isn’t one simple answer for me. I think the trick is to gradually become more self-aware and get to know your own rhythms and energies and how to fulfil all your own different needs. I have a mantra that goes, “There are lots of things I love doing, and none of them would I want to have to do every day!”
‘There are times I love being at home on my own focusing on projects, writing or daydreaming. There are days when I love in-depth conversations with one person. There are days when I love to be leading a big group of people or broadcasting to thousands. For me, it is about learning to understand all these aspects of myself and give them all the attention they need.
‘I think one of the great challenges and opportunities for us is also learning how to structure our life, energy and our time. Most of us are trained to have teachers, family members and employers tell us what goals and what projects we should pursue and how we should structure our time.
‘It can take time, awareness and discipline to take back charge of our own time and energy and commission our own projects, and to regain a higher degree of sovereignty over ourselves. But to be truly creative, we have to listen inside deeply and identify our own true projects versus the things that other people want us to do.’
More wise words to come from Nick soon on resistance and rejection.
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Some very good advice, especially re. learning how to structure your time. This is something that I really found difficult when I first started working for myself. Agree that it takes time and awareness to discover our working pattern and define our own goals and what we truly want to do.
It really does, Valerie. It always reminds me of those cartoon characters who keep running after they have gone over the cliff until suddenly they look down! It takes time to realise just how much freedom we have and to use it to our best advantage.
Nick always has wise words to share!
Yes, the freedom can be a real challenge sometimes – especially when the weather outside is calling me to take the dogs out! I have found Toodledo.com useful on a day-to-day basis for managing my tasks, but there is also the matter of tuning into your own needs to solitude and company.
Yes, and I still get that wrong from time to time! I tend to underestimate my need for input from other people until it gets critical – which is why I’m always banging on about the need to prioritise getting out. I need to hear it myself!
Like I found out, if you are going to do a lot of work alone at home, you need to have a lot of self-discipline. Nick mentions this in the article, and I really believe discipline to be a crucial factor in how much one achieves while working alone at home.
There are so many distractions, especially when working with the Internet, that getting sidetracked from real work is all too easy.
Social media is one of these factors. Chatting with friends on Facebook and Twitter can be much more appealing than cranking out another article or finishing up an infographic.
Yes indeed, Robert, time can just drift by if you’re not careful. Have you tried coworking spaces? They can be a good way to focus on a job with the reward of talking to fellow mobile workers when you’ve finished! It can be distracting at first if you’re not used to having other people around, but you do get used to it.
When you treat rejection as a compliment, it becomes easy to understand why it’s so beneficial and why saying ‘thank you’ for the experience is important.
Each ‘someone’ knows their own way, situation and circumstances. Being on the receiving of someone saying no to you is a helpful time-cost efficient way whereby the person is saying” “you’ll go (or being going) the wrong for you if you come my way.”
We form and develop relationships in order to be helpful to one another in some way and at some level. A relationship is a means to an end: the end may be a long way off or a split second at the start. Help is a natural instinct and the principles underpin self-confidence.
When someone (new) comes along but we don’t like them or can’t afford what they’re selling or whatever there’ll be a cut-off point in the relationship where we’ll think/say to ourselves, enough is enough; and thereafter we’ll tell the person we don’t want to know.
To the person on the receiving end of a rejection, the person is being told in advance the person would be wasting their time if the relationship were to go any further.
The challenge for the person on the receiving end of rejection is to emotionally accept and rationally acknowledge that it’s good for self-confidence to be helped to avoid going wrong. When one treats rejection as a positive experience the more one recognises the warnings signs so as to avoid getting involved in situations where one is likely to end up being rejected.